Republicans ready for 2012 contest

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Six Republican presidential candidates are preparing for the first official test of the US election season in the rural state of Iowa, reports BBC.
Tuesday's ballot is the first contest in the nationwide battle to be the Republican who will challenge Barack Obama for the White House in November.
Mitt Romney, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum lead polling, but the race is volatile.
Tuesday evening's caucuses will involve about 120,000 Iowans gathering in homes, schools and public buildings.
Spread across some 1,700 meetings in all of Iowa's 99 counties, the meetings see Iowans elect 28 delegates to the Republican National Convention, to be held in Florida in August.
That convention will choose the final presidential candidate to run in the 6 November presidential election.
As the vote neared, candidates spent Monday in a last-minute flurry of campaign events at coffee shops, pizza restaurants and hotel lobbies in an effort to to win over undecided voters. Rick Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator who has surged in Iowa polls in recent days, spoke in front of a packed house at a breakfast cafe in Polk City.
Despite concentrating almost exclusively on Iowa, Mr Santorum, a social conservative who appeals to Iowa's evangelical Christian voters, said his new-found popularity was helping his prospects for the long primary season to come.
"I would just say this - we've raised more money in the last few days than we've raised in the last few months," he said.
He has campaigned hard in every one of Iowa's 99 counties, impressing social conservatives with his message of rejecting gay marriage and abortion, even in cases of rape.